To win against adversaries such as China and Russia, the Army can’t just be better than a single competitor, it needs to be the best overall, and that requires cloud computing.
This technology is a key component to the military’s modernization efforts, acting Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy told reporters during a roundtable discussion on Tuesday.
“We emphasize the long-term pacing threat is China, so the capabilities to you try to develop, the way you fight, I refer to it as ‘best of breed,'” McCarthy said. “You need to be good enough to beat everybody, not just A or B.”
To do that, the military as a whole is modernizing its forces by investing in technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The goal is to harness these tools to drastically increase the speed at which the Army can operate and fight not only in traditional battlefields, but also in the cyber and space domains.
Historically, it has taken the Army decades to adopt new tools across its massive force. For example, the Army expects it will take 10 years before it can replace its nearly 50-year-old Kiowa scout helicopter, despite canceling three previous efforts. McCarthy, however, is more focused on bringing new tech to the force in the next five years.
“Artificial intelligence can be applied across the entire investment portfolio of our modernization [effort],” he said.
“And if you look at what is it going to take to get there, we got to get the cloud as an Army, because you can’t optimize artificial intelligence without the cloud. And then, you know, it’s the speed of targeting, it’s the speed of combat, that whoever gets the AI first is going to dominate.”
The military has struggled to upgrade its decades-old computer systems to the cloud, which allows software and apps to run on networks instead of local computers. Cloud computing is expected to not only help the military run more efficiently, it’s a requirement for many of the technologies it wants to adopt in the future.
A combination of slow-churning bureaucracy and an ongoing battle among Silicon Valley’s tech giants over the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud contract have delayed the cloud transition. Known as the the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, the contract was supposed to be awarded in September 2018, but it has been delayed pending a review by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
The review follows several tech companies complaining to President Trump that the contract’s details favor Amazon. Currently, only Microsoft and Amazon are being considered, since they are the only two that submitted proposals meeting Pentagon requirements.
“We don’t want to waste any more time moving forward because we know our potential adversaries are doing it at their own speed,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the chief of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday.
Chief among those adversaries is China, which is making its own significant advancements in cloud computing.
“Whether it’s Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, SenseTime, they’re all coming up with their own cloud solutions,” Shanahan said. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make them 1,000 feet tall; they’re going to have their own cloud interoperability challenges. But the level of investment and the number of people they’re putting at the problem, they’re moving at a very rapid pace, and what I can’t afford to do is slow down anymore.”
McCarthy noted that the Army is investing in the right people and projects to harness artificial intelligence.
“But ultimately, if we can’t have our data [on] the appropriate standards and formats, we’re not going to be able to utilize that very unique technology.”
